I am a proud graduate of Grand Prairie High School, which probably means nothing to I’m guessing about 29 out of 30 of you. But that 30th person out there is a Chicago Cubs fan, and if he knows his Cubs history, his hackles are already raised. You see (or maybe you don’t), the single most famous person to ever attend Grand Prairie High School is Kerry Wood, a fastballer who was drafted out of that august academy by the Cubs. But before Wood ever so much as showed up in a rookie league game, he threw 177(!) pitches in the Texas state high school baseball tournament, throwing in both ends of a doubleheader(!!!) in an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the state championship. Although Wood did make it to Wrigley Field and pitched in All-Star games and two league championship series, he went on the disabled list 14 times in 13 seasons and never lived up to his Hall of Fame potential.

And, of course, Wood missed a season due to Tommy John surgery.

"This is journalism on an epic scale, and I can’t recommend it more to serious students of the game."

THE ARM is an in-depth data dive into Tommy John surgery, which is either a curse (which means that one of the pitchers on our team has to endure it) or a cause for mild schadenfreude when a rival’s pitcher tears his ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) and is out for a solid calendar year. But as painful as knowing that your favorite pitcher isn’t going to take the ball every five games (as happened to Texas Rangers fans when Yu Darvish and Martin Perez went under the knife last year), it’s nothing compared to the pain that the pitcher feels in knowing he’ll face a year of grinding rehab --- and wondering if the new tendon will hold and whether or not he’ll be able to make it back to where he was before.

Author Jeff Passan is a baseball journalist, and THE ARM is a good, solid piece of baseball journalism. Although Passan does his best to cover the waterfront in terms of the scope of the book (including a look at the seamier precincts of youth baseball and a side trip to the high-pressure Japanese high school tournament), its focus is on the experience of two pitchers trying to make comebacks from their second Tommy John surgery. Daniel Hudson won 16 games in 2011 for a first-place Arizona Diamondbacks team, pitching over 200 innings for the first time in his career. The next season, he snapped his ligament, and then did it again on a minor league rehab assignment --- thereby becoming the dean of the Arizona “UCL Club” of injured pitchers. Todd Coffey was a journeyman middle reliever when he tore his UCL for a second time, which put his major league career in serious jeopardy.

But the book is not just about Hudson or Coffey, or even Tommy John, the pitcher who gave his name to the pioneering surgery. It’s also not just about Dr. Frank Jobe, who performed it, or Dr. James Andrews, who intersperses caring for injured major leaguers with tending to teenage boys who’ve burned out their elbow tendons trying to make The Show. It’s about what baseball is going to do, long-term, about the prevalence of elbow injuries in a sport that values 100-mile-per-hour pitching speed more than almost anything else.

It used to be enough to be a baseball fan. When salaries started exploding in the 1970s, then you had to be an accountant. When sabermetric strategies started to take over the game in the 1990s, then you had to be a statistician. Now you almost have to be an orthopedist, and Passan is an invaluable tour guide on the orthopedics of baseball --- what causes elbow injuries and what may be done to prevent them. Everybody understands the first part --- the stress of throwing baseballs at high velocities is hard on elbows. Nobody really understands the second part, although there are a lot of people (Passan throws the word “charlatan” around freely) who will tell you that they do.

THE ARM is going to be compared to Michael Lewis’ MONEYBALL, which is unfair in a lot of ways. Passan’s style is a lot clunkier than Lewis’, and the central character of his narrative is a triangular hunk of elbow gristle instead of a charismatic general manager who could be played by Brad Pitt in a movie. But THE ARM may be the more important book in the long run. This is journalism on an epic scale, and I can’t recommend it more to serious students of the game.